CountryOS

April fools' day product, that everybody wished was true. "The best way to manage your country in the 21st century".

Design

Development

Web

Global prank

The goal was to create an international marketing campaign that demonstrates Thorgate’s product
development skills globally. In order for this April fool's joke to work, we had to do create
something truly professional and amazing, but be realistic and believable the same time. As Estonia
has always been thinking of exporting it’s e-governmental tools more efficiently, we made the
country-as-a-service happen, already in 2016.

60 000 visitors in a day

After launching on April 1, 2016, CountryOS got truly viral receiving more than 60 000 visitors and
3000 signups in a few days. It was trending on social media including ProductHunt, Reddit,
Hackernews and other sites. The site received hundreds of e-mails and cooperation opportunities
within the following few weeks.

From concept to reality in less than a week

Concept

CountryOS is the dream software-as-a-service product for managing government just like you would
manage a startup today using web-based team collaboration tools.

Design

In order to appeal to the target audience - the governments and public sector employees - the
product has been designed to look as professional and consumer-friendly as possible.

Development

Plenty of seamless, yet beautiful front-end animations were added to the sales pages. In addition,
we added a realistic pricing calculation tool.

Truly viral

Within the first three days, CountryOS went truly viral, trending on social media including
ProductHunt, Reddit, Hackernews and other sites. It received more than 50k unique pageviews and
millions of impressions, globally. More than 3000 people signed up for the product.

This is the future

Even though the project was made as an April fool's prank, we received hundreds of congratulations
and supportive feedback, showing this is what people and governments actually want and also need in
the future. Today, an April fools' prank; tomorrow reality.

50k

UNIQUE PAGEVIEWS

5m

SOCIAL MEDIA IMPRESSIONS

3k

SIGNUPS

Featured on:

Arctic startup was he first media channel to spread the news about CountryOS.